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I think most people's asymmetric bandwidth rates would get in the way of a p2p solution being usable.

Maybe if there were some way to break the stream up into individual media files, and then you could download one identical file from lots of different users at the same time.



In the case of Netflix, the video content doesn't need to go through a proxy; only the website does (at the moment). So bandwidth shouldn't really be an issue.


Multipath TCP exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP

but that requires the cooperation of Netflix, naturally.


BitTorrent?


BitTorrent works because uploaders only ever upload a small piece of the file. This works well for downloads but not at all for streaming.




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